Giving back is No. 1 for restaurateur
Paramount Fine Foods has kept up its charitable giving despite profits dropping in pandemic
Somehow, at the crack of dawn, Paramount Fine Foods CEO Mohamad Fakih wakes up every day thinking how to keep his restaurant empire afloat during one of the worst crises to hit the food business in recent memory.
The Lebanese Canadian businessman was determined from the get-go not to cut staff en-masse, as some competitors have done, nor to raise prices on Paramount goods. Business is down, but Fakih’s philosophy around corporate responsibility is ironclad: Give back to your community, especially in times of financial hardship. You depend on them, after all.
Paramount’s revenues may be down, but the business launched several new brand initiatives, artfully pivoted to delivery and takeout service, and even offered more affordable meal options at the height of the pandemic’s first wave in April of 2020.
Fakih spoke to the Star this summer about steering Paramount through the pandemic, his thoughts on Islamophobia in Canada and why businesses need to think about charity when the chips are down:
I’ve read you make a point of visiting your colleagues at Paramount Fine Foods headquarters every day and just chatting with them. How
has your daily routine changed since the pandemic struck?
When the pandemic started, right away, it took me back to the war in Lebanon. And I realized there are no bombs. A lot of people died but the streets are safe to walk. We can still maintain our culture as Paramount could be maintained — modified, pivoted, but maintained. We used to grab a coffee and walk around desk-to-desk with our staff, so we created what we call a morning check-in. We used to get all the staff at head office on Zoom calls, including me, and we check in on each other. We tell each other a win and we tell something that is making us lose
sleep. It’s five minutes. Very fast. We hear each other. We look at each other’s faces.
The first two months of the pandemic, I had to leave my house for approximately five weeks and see my kids through the glass because I didn’t want to change who I am and what they built this company on. My staff always looked at me being there, appreciating them, showing my face — not sending them emails — high-fiving with them. What gets me up every morning is giving back to the community, and I didn’t want to stop that. My wife said: “if you
want to continue doing this, that’s fine, but how are we keeping the kids safe?” I said: “You’re right, and that’s why I’m going to live in a hotel for five weeks.”
You’ve done a lot of charitable spending during the pandemic, but I imagine Paramount Fine Foods is not doing well financially right now. How do you juggle giving to charity while sustaining your business?
This is the most fun question I could be asked. People think charity is extra. You give when you’re rich, when you reach your financial independence, when your company is doing amazing. I’m wired differently. You actually give more when you need more support. You actually help more when you want the support of your customers and staff.
Eight out of 10 food companies in Canada today aren’t making profit. They have lost a couple of locations. They’ll be lucky if their income is cut in half or there is only 25 per cent of income left, if there is any. But the only way you deserve to stay as a company is when you show you’re active with your people and your community during a time of hardship. When we lost 90 per cent of our sales in March 2020 — in April we launched what we called the Dare to Care menu. We actually lowered our prices for food because we felt Canadians needed to buy more with their dollars. So we decided to forget about the profit and move into investing in the community. It’s a very simple formula.
Companies need to put back that money — not from firing staff. It should not come from cutting down on charity that they’ve supported over the years. It should not be shareholders first. In our country, we desperately need a kinder capitalism and kinder CEOs. We need to stop thinking that shareholders come first. We need to stop thinking that only customers come first. We need to start thinking our people come first, and our people is our staff, the people that supported our businesses and our community. The people that are in need.
I feel ashamed that we can sit and talk about money when five million Canadians cannot provide for themselves on their dining table tonight. This is the time when companies need to show that shareholders do not come first, and they will get more support from their customers.
So how did you support Paramount staff during the pandemic?
The way I saw the pandemic, when it came to business, we needed to be a little like a shark and like a goldfish. To survive, the shark must keep moving forward — and a goldfish has a very short memory. Just a few seconds. It’s never going to fall into the trap of getting nostalgic about how things used to be. A goldfish is all about what’s now and what’s next. Don’t lose momentum by slowing down.
When our stores were closed a year ago, we transferred the indoor space to maximize the pickup and delivery. A lot of people did that.
When my team walked into the room and said: “What are we going to do? We have a lot of staff. We’re not going to need them again?” I said: “Look, whatever decision you make, do not cause a child to lose a glass of milk on the table that Paramount has provided through a job. This is the only thing I’m going to put my foot down on today.” So, what we did: First month, we paid them in full. Then we went into a top-up option — so they go to a temporary layoff and then get topped up by our company, so they don’t lose a penny from their salary.
Then, my team came up with a solution to rotate the way we work until we launch three more brands. We launched Box’d — and we maintained the jobs of the people we wanted. Then we launched a fried chicken concept, KRISPO, inside Paramount. To maintain all the in-house office staff that used to be at the front, we moved them to the back, we trained them on KRISPO, and we maximized top line sales. I went to Massimo Capra, and I convinced him to partner with me on his beautiful, amazing pizza made with halal products. We launched Massimo inside Paramount. We created three brands that we can franchise, the staff is paid, and they believe more in the culture of Paramount. That’s the bottom line.
Do you think those three brands would have happened if a pandemic hadn’t happened?
No, I don’t think so. We, as well, were comfortable with what we had and we didn’t really need to venture out. But necessity created that pivot. We can sit back and complain about a year and a half of difficult cash flow for Paramount, but Paramount had a great 15 years to celebrate as a company and shareholders have to put back some money into that year and a half, instead of taking from our community. There is nothing better in the world than investing in your community.
After the Quebec City mosque massacre in 2017, there was a lot of talk about how Canada needed to confront its history of Islamophobia. Then, earlier this year, there was an attack on a Muslim family in London. As someone who’s followed both attacks closely, do you think anything’s changed in the past couple of years?
A lot of politicians at different levels of government could have done much more in the time frame between London and Quebec. A lot of things they’re going to start doing now — they could have done before. I don’t know what’s on their priority list, but it fell to the bottom. Not a lot happened from the Quebec attacks until what happened in London.
I think addressing Islamophobia needs real political will. Politicians need to understand that they can’t expect to close an eye on Bill 21 in Quebec and not see more hate across the country. I understand the federal government cannot do much about Bill 21 and we would not want to waste our energy asking the federal government to do more, but they can take a clearer stance and say, “if Bill 21 was happening in Ontario, I would have done this, this, and that.”
I don’t think it’s right in our country that a person wearing hijab cannot be a teacher or a lawyer. It doesn’t matter where in our country — it doesn’t matter how many votes it should cost. Our principles should not be dependent on demographics. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and all Canadians should have equal opportunity anywhere they go. How much of a political will is there to address seriously — seriously — doing every single thing we can to fight Islamophobia, anti-Semitic, anti-Black racism and hatred in Canada. Hate affects us all. It is affecting the way we approach things and think of things and the culture of our country.
I assume you’ve gotten government assistance with the federal wage top-up. Has that helped at all?
The federal government help was good, but it wasn’t enough. The subsidy should continue. If restaurants have not made money in a year and a half, what they’re living off is debt. We can’t expect to reopen as if nothing happened to these businesses. Their accounts payable are full and their credit cards are full. And if we do not help them for a softer landing, we might see much more bankruptcy at the end of the pandemic than we saw during the pandemic.